LUCIUS

See also:

• LUCIUS CESTIUS

CESTIUS  , surnamed Plus, Latin rhetorician, flourished during the reign of Augustus . He was a native of Smyrna, a Greek by birth . According to Jerome, he was teaching Latin at Rome in the year 13 B . C . He must have been living after A.D . 9, since, we are told that he taunted the son of Quintilius Varus with his father's defeat in the Teutoburgian forest (Seneca, Controv. i . 3, 10) . Cestius was a man of great ability, but vain, quarrelsome and sarcastic . Before he left Asia, he was invited to dinner by Cicero's son, then governor of the province . His host, being uncertain 'a, to his identity, asked a slave who Cestius was; and on receiving the answer, " he is the man who said your father was illiterate," ordered him to be flogged (Seneca, Suasoriae, vii . 13) . As an orator in the schools Cestius enjoyed a great reputation, and was worshipped by his youthful pupils, one of whom imitated him so slavishly that he was nicknamed " my monkey by his teacher (Seneca, Controv. ix .

3, 12) . As a public orator, on the other

hand, he was a failure . Although a Greek, he always used Latin in his declamations, and, although he was sometimes at a loss for Latin words, he never suffered from lack of ideas . Numerous specimens of his declamations will be found in the works of Seneca the rhetorician . See the monograph De Lucio Cestio Pio, by F . G . Lindner (1858) ; Brzoska in Pauly-Wissowa's Realencyclopadie, iii . 2 (1899); euffel-Schwabe, Hist. of Roman Lit . (Eng. tr.), § 268, 6; M . Schanz, Geschichte der romischen Litteratur, ii .